The Centenary of a Troubled Century: 1914-2014

This year marks the
anniversary of more than one significant event, including the four-hundred-and-fiftieth anniversary of the death of John Calvin. But the hundredth anniversary
of the beginning of what is variously called the Great War and the First World
War holds special significance for many of us, because, on a personal level, it
affected our own families and, on a global scale, inaugurated a protracted
period of nearly unprecedented horrors that uprooted and eliminated entire
populations.

After the boundless
optimism of the post-Napoleonic period, in which even many Christians were
caught up, the old order came crashing down in an orgy of blood-letting and
hatred that would last, in some fashion, until 1989, with the opening of the
Berlin Wall. Prior to 1914, my father’s family were nominal subjects of the
Ottoman Sultan in Cyprus, albeit under British administration from 1878. (In
fact, the first appointed British High Commissioner to Cyprus, Sir Garnet
Wolseley, had commanded the expedition in Canada to put down Louis Riel’s
Red River Rebellion eight years earlier.) When Britain and Turkey became
combatants at the outbreak of the Great War, Britain was compelled to annex Cyprus
outright lest its residents, including my relatives, become enemy aliens.

On my mother’s side of the
family, my nineteenth-century ancestors were subjects of the Russian Tsar
in his capacity as Grand Duke of Finland. A remote ancestor even fought for the
King of Sweden against Russia’s Peter the Great three centuries ago. They came
to America, probably via Halifax, Nova Scotia, for a variety of reasons, one of
which was to escape conscription into the Russian-controlled military.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, much of the world was presided over by an interlocking network of the descendants
of Queen Victoria and Denmark’s King Christian IX. Although this made Europe
appear on the surface to be a big cozy family, such blood relationships did
little to curtail the increasingly intense rivalries amongst the major powers
of the day.

In fact, by 1914 this grand
European royal clan looked more like a dysfunctional family, with tensions
bubbling furiously below the surface. It took an assassin’s bullets to bring it
into the open, and by August of that fateful year Europe, and much of the
world, was at war.

There is, of course, no
need to recount here the history of the twentieth century, whose contours
are familiar enough to us. But it is worth pointing out that the outbreak of
war in 1914 unleashed a decades-long chain reaction that left millions who
survived two major global conflicts uprooted and exiled. Greek Orthodox
Christians and Armenians were forced to leave Asia Minor after nearly two
thousand years of residence. Ethnic Germans were compelled to leave East
Prussia and other eastern provinces where they had lived for centuries. And, of
course, many Europeans decided to leave their troubled continent altogether to
seek better lives in far-off Canada, the United States, or Australia. The very
existence of Christian Courier, Redeemer University College (where I teach) and the Christian Labour Association of Canada is a testament to one such migration.
And my own presence in this world would not have come
about were it not for at least three migrations over the last century and a
third. The Great War played a pivotal role in two of these.

How then do we mark this
tragic and momentous anniversary? By remembering. Remembering, among other
things, the dangers of rampant nationalism, of reckless arms races, of
political orders that neglect the lives of the poor and vulnerable. But also by
remembering with humility that many of us might not have existed at all apart
from the events unleashed by this conflict.

Platitudes are of no
help at this point. We cannot, and perhaps dare not, try to fathom the mystery
of evil, which has puzzled humanity down through the millennia. Yet I myself am
grateful that God’s grace has come to us even in the midst of a
less-than-perfect world. When next I attend our family’s church, and see the
tattered century-old Union Jack mounted under glass on the wall in the
entryway, I will thank God for his faithfulness and then pray that we who live
today will have learned the lessons of that terrible conflict of a century ago.

David T. Koyzis has taught politics at Redeemer University College in Canada since 1987 and is the author of the award-winning Political Visions and Illusions. This is a slightly modified version of an article that appeared in the 10 February issue of Canadian periodical Christian Courier.